About the QPQ Tracker
A project of Anti-Corruption Action, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
Mission
The Quid Pro Quo Tracker is an open-source investigative database that connects political donors, recipients, donations, policy outcomes, and enablers into a single searchable, visual interface. Existing platforms track donations or map power relationships, but none systematically connect money to specific policy outcomes. This tracker closes that gap by linking campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, and independent spending to the legislative votes, regulatory actions, and appointments that follow.
The tracker does not assert causation between donations and outcomes. It presents documented connections drawn entirely from public records and lets users draw their own conclusions.
Data Sources
Every data point in the tracker is linked to its source citation for verification. The following public data sources feed the tracker through automated ingestion pipelines.
Campaign finance data for all federal elections. Individual contributions, PAC receipts and disbursements, independent expenditures, party committee transfers, and electioneering communications. The primary source for connecting donors to recipients.
Requires an API key (free). Rate-limited to 1,000 requests per hour. Attribution required per FEC terms of service.
Legislative data from the Library of Congress. Bill text, status, cosponsors, committee actions, amendments, and roll-call votes. Provides the policy outcome side of the money-to-outcome chain, including which legislators voted for or against specific bills and when those votes occurred.
Requires an API key (free). Rate limits apply. Data covers the 113th Congress (2013) onward with increasing completeness.
Federal rulemaking data. Proposed rules, final rules, public comments, and supporting documents across all federal agencies. Ties lobbying activity to specific rulemakings by matching docket numbers to lobbying disclosure filings, revealing which organizations commented on or sought to influence particular regulatory actions.
Requires an API key (free from api.data.gov). Rate-limited to 1,000 requests per hour per key.
Corporate disclosure filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission. 10-K and 10-Q filings reveal corporate structure and financial relationships. 8-K material event reports disclose significant corporate actions. Proxy statements (DEF 14A) disclose political spending by publicly traded companies, executive compensation, and board-level conflicts of interest.
Free, no API key required. Rate-limited by fair-use headers (User-Agent identification required, max 10 requests per second). JSON endpoints available for structured data access.
Every federal contract, grant, loan, and other financial assistance award issued by the U.S. government. Connects companies and organizations that receive federal dollars to their lobbying and campaign contribution activity, revealing potential pay-to-play patterns where political spending correlates with government contracts.
Free, no API key required. Bulk download available. Data sourced from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and the Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS).
Registrations filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act with the Department of Justice. Identifies U.S. lobbying firms and individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments, political parties, and foreign principals. Includes registration dates, termination dates, and the countries represented.
Bulk CSV download from the FARA e-File system. No API key required. Updated periodically by the DOJ FARA Unit.
Corporate registration data from company registries worldwide. Jurisdiction of incorporation, company status, incorporation and dissolution dates, registered agent information, previous company names, and (where available) officer and director listings. Used to enrich organization entities with corporate structure details.
Requires an API token. Open_data plan allows 10,000 calls per day and 50,000 per month. Officer data may require a higher-tier plan. Attribution required per OpenCorporates terms.
International sanctions lists, politically exposed persons (PEP) databases, and enforcement actions consolidated from hundreds of government sources worldwide. Screens entities in the tracker against OFAC, EU, UN, and other sanctions regimes. Flags individuals who hold or have held prominent public functions.
Requires an API key. Trial and paid plans available. Data is CC-BY-SA licensed with attribution required.
IRS Form 990 filings for tax-exempt organizations. Revenue, expenses, executive compensation, grants made and received, and organizational details for nonprofits, foundations, and political organizations. Connects dark-money groups and think tanks to their funding sources and expenditures.
Free, no API key required. Data derived from IRS e-file records. Attribution to ProPublica required.
Federal and state court opinions, dockets, oral arguments, and judicial financial disclosures. Connects legal proceedings to the entities and relationships in the tracker, including cases involving campaign finance violations, lobbying disclosure enforcement, and corporate fraud. Judicial financial disclosures reveal potential conflicts of interest.
Free API with rate limits. Bulk data available. Maintained by the Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Comprehensive lobbying data linking federal lobbying disclosure filings to specific bills, agencies, and issues. Connects lobbyists, lobbying firms, and their clients to the legislation and regulations they sought to influence. Enables systematic tracking of which organizations lobbied on which bills and how much they spent.
Academic dataset maintained by MIT. API access available for researchers and public-interest projects. Attribution required.
Methodology
Automated data pipelines pull records from federal APIs on a weekly schedule. Each pipeline validates incoming data against expected schemas, applies entity resolution to match records across sources, and stores raw filings alongside normalized entities and relationships.
An NLP pipeline extracts entities and relationships from investigative reporting. All machine-extracted data passes through a human review queue before entering the production database.
Data Integrity Practices
Entity resolution and canonicalization
Federal records contain messy donor names, inconsistent organization names, and duplicated entries. The tracker uses deterministic matching (FEC committee IDs, EINs, registration numbers) as the primary key, with fuzzy name matching as a secondary signal. Each entity maintains a canonical name alongside all known aliases and variant spellings.
Source attribution
Every row in the database is linked to a source citation with a URL pointing to the original filing or record. When data is enriched from multiple sources, each enrichment carries its own citation. Users can click through to the underlying government record for any data point displayed in the tracker.
Rate limiting and backoff
Ingestion pipelines implement exponential backoff and retry logic for rate-limited APIs. The FEC API allows 1,000 requests per hour. Regulations.gov allows 1,000 per hour per key. SEC EDGAR requires a declared User-Agent and limits to 10 requests per second. Pipelines track daily API usage budgets and pause automatically when approaching limits.
API key management
All API keys are stored as environment variables, never in source code. In production, keys are managed through Vercel environment variables with restricted access. Service role keys that grant write access to the database are never exposed to the browser.
Attribution and terms of service
Each data source has its own attribution requirements. FEC data must be attributed to the Federal Election Commission. OpenSanctions data is CC-BY-SA licensed. OpenCorporates requires attribution to OpenCorporates. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer data must credit ProPublica. The tracker complies with each source's terms of service, including rate limits, fair-use policies, and redistribution terms.
Open Source
The Quid Pro Quo Tracker is open-source software. The codebase, ingestion pipelines, and database schema are publicly available for review, replication, and contribution.
Contact
For questions, corrections, or partnership inquiries, contact Anti-Corruption Action at kristofer@anticorruptionaction.org.